I meant to post this earlier today, but somehow an unexpected quantity of my time went toward things like shoveling (and watching the men's figure skating, all right? It's one of the few Olympic sports I follow). It was not quite the snowpocalypse we were promised, but certainly a respectable late-winter storm. Fortunately, I also got around to making ginger cookies from a new recipe: molasses and black pepper.
On Monday, for President's Day, I went with my family to see John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) at the Harvard Film Archive. It's one of the most interesting biopics I have seen in either years or ever—it is a piece of pure mythmaking, but not hagiography. I do not mean that it's revisionist of Lincoln. As played by Henry Fonda (who I never knew could look so gawky and so indissolubly alone), the thirty-four-year-old Lincoln is honest, intellectual, profoundly moral and profoundly troubled by a world in which lynchings are the sport of righteous citizens and the veterans of old wars are merely an excuse to get blotto on moonshine and set some tar barrels afire. He moves within an atmosphere of silence, out of which he gathers simple words and speaks them directly. No extrovert, he looks most comfortable reading in various undignified positions, his long legs angled up a tree or propped out the window of his law office; he has a habit of settling, cranelike, on stairs or doorsills. But he's not a naïf. He's not a holy fool. He's not the second coming of John Brown. He is gangly and (famously by the standards of the 1830's) unhandsome, self-educated, an effortful fingernail up from dirt poor, and never unaware of his status as an outsider; his direct, folksy charm is genuine and it is also a learned behavior. It is very likely that he is frighteningly more intelligent than anyone who shares a floor with him, a fact which opponents overlook at their own risk—and yet they do, consistently, until the last moments of the trial reveal just how many steps ahead of the game this skinny self-deprecating lawyer always is. And he's no good at courtship behaviors. He waltzes like a paralytic yak.1 He gets out of a game of tug-of-war by cheating, unconcernedly wandering off with the leftovers of the pie-judging contest and another book. There is a line about slavery that is jawdropping if you are expecting the Great Emancipator. If the film is a portrait of a great man, it's a splintery one; and I thought it was wonderful.
Its only misstep, for me, came at the very end. I thought it was going to close, after a flash of summer lightning, on the image of the young Lincoln moving off right—into history—as the rain looses in a curtain around him, the eye of the storm that will encompass the Civil War and presently his own shattering death; but instead "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" rose up from the soundtrack and the rainy absence of a living man was replaced by the whited sepulchre of the Lincoln Memorial: the concrete legend, deified by his truth is marching on. And after ninety-eight minutes of a three-dimensional person, whatever resemblance he bore to the actual Abraham Lincoln, I really felt the last two had missed the point. But it was this abiding annoyance with the last scene which enabled me, hours later, to identify the aspect of the movie (aside from the fact that it was excellent: in a different year, Henry Fonda might have taken an Oscar for his performance) that made me respond so instinctively to it. Biographical films fictionalize their subjects all the time. But they usually do so within conventions: a love interest, a hard-knock hero's journey, a glossing of less sympathetic or more contradictory traits, etc. etc. and so forth. Young Mr. Lincoln does none of this. It creates a fictitious event in consonance with the historical character—an untried lawyer's against-the-odds defense of two brothers accused of murdering a deputy sheriff of Springfield, IL; the central legal trick is drawn from a case Lincoln defended in 1858, but the rest is straight out of Lamar Trotti's head—and the result is nothing like Amistad (1997) or Inherit the Wind (1960) so much as it is like The Sword in the Stone (1938). It's an entirely invented prologue to a narrative so well-known, it does not even need to be alluded to.2 And so what I think Ford is doing is actually engaging with Lincoln as an American myth: and as we all know from experience, a myth can be retold. Again, this is not the same as historical revisionism. The film doesn't mine back through deposits of tradition, it doesn't contradict the prevailing image; for all the humanity he and Fonda reflect into their subject, Ford isn't interested in discovering the "real" Lincoln. But that's not a failing, unless you're prepared to say the same against Mary Stewart for her Merlin of The Crystal Cave (1970). I'm not sure how often I've seen this approach to American history; or at least consciously, God knows there are enough myths freighted to this country. But here it works beautifully, and now I'm not surprised that no one has done a movie biography of Lincoln since. It would have to be something entirely different. And it might still be in the shadow of a jack-legged lawyer from Kentucky, walking to the top of that hill, out of this world.
1. He is told afterward by Marjorie Weaver's Mary Todd, "Mr. Lincoln, at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen."
2. Hence the real problem with the closing shot of Lincoln's statue: we don't need it. As our single presentiment of the future, the storm is enough.
On Monday, for President's Day, I went with my family to see John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) at the Harvard Film Archive. It's one of the most interesting biopics I have seen in either years or ever—it is a piece of pure mythmaking, but not hagiography. I do not mean that it's revisionist of Lincoln. As played by Henry Fonda (who I never knew could look so gawky and so indissolubly alone), the thirty-four-year-old Lincoln is honest, intellectual, profoundly moral and profoundly troubled by a world in which lynchings are the sport of righteous citizens and the veterans of old wars are merely an excuse to get blotto on moonshine and set some tar barrels afire. He moves within an atmosphere of silence, out of which he gathers simple words and speaks them directly. No extrovert, he looks most comfortable reading in various undignified positions, his long legs angled up a tree or propped out the window of his law office; he has a habit of settling, cranelike, on stairs or doorsills. But he's not a naïf. He's not a holy fool. He's not the second coming of John Brown. He is gangly and (famously by the standards of the 1830's) unhandsome, self-educated, an effortful fingernail up from dirt poor, and never unaware of his status as an outsider; his direct, folksy charm is genuine and it is also a learned behavior. It is very likely that he is frighteningly more intelligent than anyone who shares a floor with him, a fact which opponents overlook at their own risk—and yet they do, consistently, until the last moments of the trial reveal just how many steps ahead of the game this skinny self-deprecating lawyer always is. And he's no good at courtship behaviors. He waltzes like a paralytic yak.1 He gets out of a game of tug-of-war by cheating, unconcernedly wandering off with the leftovers of the pie-judging contest and another book. There is a line about slavery that is jawdropping if you are expecting the Great Emancipator. If the film is a portrait of a great man, it's a splintery one; and I thought it was wonderful.
Its only misstep, for me, came at the very end. I thought it was going to close, after a flash of summer lightning, on the image of the young Lincoln moving off right—into history—as the rain looses in a curtain around him, the eye of the storm that will encompass the Civil War and presently his own shattering death; but instead "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" rose up from the soundtrack and the rainy absence of a living man was replaced by the whited sepulchre of the Lincoln Memorial: the concrete legend, deified by his truth is marching on. And after ninety-eight minutes of a three-dimensional person, whatever resemblance he bore to the actual Abraham Lincoln, I really felt the last two had missed the point. But it was this abiding annoyance with the last scene which enabled me, hours later, to identify the aspect of the movie (aside from the fact that it was excellent: in a different year, Henry Fonda might have taken an Oscar for his performance) that made me respond so instinctively to it. Biographical films fictionalize their subjects all the time. But they usually do so within conventions: a love interest, a hard-knock hero's journey, a glossing of less sympathetic or more contradictory traits, etc. etc. and so forth. Young Mr. Lincoln does none of this. It creates a fictitious event in consonance with the historical character—an untried lawyer's against-the-odds defense of two brothers accused of murdering a deputy sheriff of Springfield, IL; the central legal trick is drawn from a case Lincoln defended in 1858, but the rest is straight out of Lamar Trotti's head—and the result is nothing like Amistad (1997) or Inherit the Wind (1960) so much as it is like The Sword in the Stone (1938). It's an entirely invented prologue to a narrative so well-known, it does not even need to be alluded to.2 And so what I think Ford is doing is actually engaging with Lincoln as an American myth: and as we all know from experience, a myth can be retold. Again, this is not the same as historical revisionism. The film doesn't mine back through deposits of tradition, it doesn't contradict the prevailing image; for all the humanity he and Fonda reflect into their subject, Ford isn't interested in discovering the "real" Lincoln. But that's not a failing, unless you're prepared to say the same against Mary Stewart for her Merlin of The Crystal Cave (1970). I'm not sure how often I've seen this approach to American history; or at least consciously, God knows there are enough myths freighted to this country. But here it works beautifully, and now I'm not surprised that no one has done a movie biography of Lincoln since. It would have to be something entirely different. And it might still be in the shadow of a jack-legged lawyer from Kentucky, walking to the top of that hill, out of this world.
1. He is told afterward by Marjorie Weaver's Mary Todd, "Mr. Lincoln, at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen."
2. Hence the real problem with the closing shot of Lincoln's statue: we don't need it. As our single presentiment of the future, the storm is enough.
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